By NANCY HILER
Clues about the map's origin were discovered by a student, and later supplemented with information provided by an archivist from the decorative painting firm that came forward to lay claim to having created it.
Last spring, Mepham teacher Sue Ptacek gave her Photography 3 class an assignment to photograph the mural to help the Mepham Alumni Association document its restoration, which the group funded. While photographing the mural with a zoom lens, student James Zarvos noticed that there was additional lettering of town names and other details beneath those painted on the surface -- details that were all but impossible to see with the naked eye.
"I told Mrs. Ptacek and Maggie Hennessy [of the alumni association] that there was something under the map," Zarvos, 17, now a senior, said recently.
His discovery was later confirmed by art conservator Jonathan Sherman, who restored the mural over the summer. Once Sherman got up on scaffolding to take a close look, he could see many more details beneath the surface of the mural, he said.
"Even if you look up close, it's hard to see," Zarvos said. "The zoom and the camera flash do a lot." He pointed out examples of indistinct lettering in the background of repositioned and repainted names of places such as Patchogue and bodies of water such as the Great Peconic Bay on the map.
Zarvos said his camera also picked up what looked to him to be raised edges of the map where land ended and the ocean began. Sherman found that those were paper edges coming loose. He said that the map had been originally sketched on paper and glued onto canvas, and the canvas was adhered to the wall.
Zarvos took about 600 photos of the mural, panoramic views as well as detailed images, before and after its restoration. "I zoomed in and took every inch," he said.
Some of his photographs, as well as others by classmates, were published in the alumni magazine, Scuttlebutt, "so the alumni could see where their donations went," Zarvos said. Additionally, some of his images were enlarged and put on display at the mural's rededication during the school's 70th anniversary celebration last month.
Archivist with answers
At the celebration, Frank Setteducati, a 1970 graduate and a past president of the Mepham Alumni Association, announced that Sherman was in the process of confirming that a family-owned, Manhattan-based decorative painting firm, Rambusch Decorative Studio, founded in the 1870s, created the map -- a mystery that many thought might go unsolved.
Setteducati said that one of Rambusch's owners believed that an identical map was created for the original Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan, and that it was removed when the hotel was demolished to make way for construction of the Empire State Building in 1931. "It may have been the same one and reinstalled here," Setteducati said.
Since then, Catha Grace Rambusch, the Rambusch company archivist and a daughter-in-law of one of the firm's founders, has come forward to confirm that the map was indeed created by the firm, but she corrected its specific origin.
As it turns out, the original Waldorf Hotel, built in 1893 at 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue, which became the Waldorf-Astoria when a sister hotel was built next door in 1897, was demolished in 1929 and became part of the Empire State Building's block-long site. The mural, however, was never in that hotel.
Instead, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was built at 50th Street between Park and Lexington avenues in 1931, and the map was created as a mural for one of its restaurants, the Norse Grill. (The restaurant is now the Bull and Bear.)
"The hotel manager [in 1931], Mr. [Lucius] Boomer, felt the map didn't fit with the theme he wanted," Rambusch surmised. No one realized that the map was probably then moved to Mepham, she said, until she and others in the firm were shown photographs of it.
"I remember seeing the map in the restaurant as a child, when I went there with my father," Rambusch said. The Rambusch firm was commissioned by Boomer's architects to complete the hotel's overall design.
"Discordant" design
Rambusch backed up her anecdotal evidence with a document on the firm's history, which describes the mural and gives further credence to the notion that its "discordant" style likely caused it to be relocated:
"Mr. Boomer's wife was Norwegian, and peppered throughout the lobbies were Scandinavian decorative devices. ... It was the Norse Grill on the Lexington Avenue side of the hotel that received special attention ...
"The west wall was dominated by a massive, carved limestone fireplace. The mural that hung above was a map of the environs of New York City, Long Island, highlighting locations of country clubs and golf courses. It provided the only, and oddly, discordant note in the room."
If the map was created for a restaurant rather than a school, that helps explain why it was being painted over and changed. Features such as golf courses and country clubs were likely hidden in the repainting, and geographic features and other sites were added.
Comments about this story? NHiler@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 234.
